Bermuda: Equipment fault blamed for island wide blackout
The Bermuda Electric Light Company Limited (BELCO) has said that a preliminary investigation into last Friday’s island-wide blackout revealed that an equipment fault was the cause of the incident.
In a statement on Sunday, BELCO said: “Initial reports indicate that there was a failure of the blue phase of the voltage transformer (VT) associated with one of the baseload engines. The protection systems operated as designed tripped the engine and activated the suppression system,” the company said.
BELCO stated that the engine connected with the damaged VT has now returned to service while the damaged transformer was replaced.
The company has sent the damaged VT overseas for forensic analysis.
BELCO President Wayne Caines thanked members of the public for their patience and crew members who worked to restore power by 9:30 pm.
“On days like Friday, we saw the resiliency and cooperation of Bermudians all across the island as we worked to restore our electricity. This cooperation extends to government officials and even our emergency response teams. We are also proud of the BELCO team who worked well into the night to restore power to our customers. A restoration effort like the one required for a system like ours is a challenging exercise of balancing supply and demand, and our teams answered the challenge,” he stated.
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